


Feel I’m on the Verge of Some Great Truth

by theshipsfirstmate



Category: One Day at a Time (TV 2017)
Genre: 3x12 - Freeform, Alvareider, F/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-03
Updated: 2019-04-03
Packaged: 2020-01-04 04:44:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18336425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theshipsfirstmate/pseuds/theshipsfirstmate
Summary: Some missing bits from 3x12 – Penelope deals with Schneider’s relapse, and the aftermath."She saw his father walk out on him with ease, just weeks ago, knows that Avery did the same not long after. Someone needs to fight for him this time. Her hands are already clenching to fists."





	Feel I’m on the Verge of Some Great Truth

_A/N: My first Alvareider fic! Holy moly, these two brought the feels almost as soon as I started watching – which was tragically right before Netflix dropped the axe. I’m still holding out hope for a season 4 pickup, because I need more of the Alvarez fam in general and these two in particular._

_Title from “[Wait](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DZFPVF9J9Wmo&t=YmE1OWEyYjg4YzY3OGYxNjY5YTZmZTg2MmM4N2Y5NDBmNGFjMzk4Niw4UEl3bTdsbA%3D%3D&b=t%3AiAw4tJIAalN1OvhWtUFPsQ&p=http%3A%2F%2Ftheshipsfirstmate.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F183909829404%2Fodaat-fic-feel-im-on-the-verge-of-some-great&m=1)” by Alexi Murdoch._

**Feel I’m on the Verge of Some Great Truth  
**

_“You don’t have to do that alone.”_

She says those words to him, fingers combing through the soft hair at the back of his neck, and for a moment, she forgets who they are to each other. She watches his eyes close in anguish, and she remembers, not for the first time, that she’s done this before.

* * *

It was Alex who first brought it up, after Penelope found them sitting next to each other on the laundry room floor. Four sad eyes stared up at her, two rimmed red with liquor and remorse.

“Pen, shit, I’m  _sorry_ ,” Schneider had mumbled as Alex stood and the two of them helped him to his feet. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt him…”

She had stopped cold at that half-confession, able for a moment to see only bright red in front of her eyes.

“ _Mami_ , it’s fine.” Her son’s voice cut through the instinctive response and he gave her a pointed look and a nod from the other side of Schneider’s chest, like he knew exactly where her mind had gone. His tone was almost bossy – if she could have felt anything through the panic, it might have been annoyance – but he was calm and he didn’t look hurt, only worried. “I’m okay, it was nothing. Let’s just get him upstairs.”

They didn’t say it out loud – not that she could hear much over the ringing in her ears – but Penelope’s pretty sure neither of them even considered taking Schneider to his own apartment. Still, he was nearly dead weight, and once they had maneuvered him inside their doorway, they only got as far as Mami’s room before they had to set him down on the pull-out couch.

“If you throw up in here…” Penelope started to warn, but Schneider groaned an interruption before she could think of a suitable punishment.

“I’ll buy you a whole new living room set,” he promised, though he still looked a little green for her liking.

She hustled back to her room then, passing Elena who was sitting at the kitchen table, homework abandoned, eyes wide like they used to go when Victor would wake them up as he crashed around the living room after a long night.

“Elena, come help me in the kitchen.” Penelope heard her Mami call for her daughter as she rounded the hallway, and she put a note on her mental list to say a prayer of thanks later that night for the viejita and her quick thinking. There were only so many things she could worry about at once.  _“Vámonos, mija.”_

In her room, she knew exactly where to look – the third dresser drawer down, where a pair of Schneider’s sweats and a soft, grey henley were neatly folded next to her own pajamas. They had gotten mixed in with her laundry one day, months ago now, and she kept meaning to give them back. But she hadn’t – a curiosity there just wasn’t any time for tonight. Stepping back into the hallway to chuck them in Schneider’s direction, Penelope wondered, in a brief moment of panic as she closed the curtain behind her, if things would ever be the same again.

It’s the second time in two years that she’s missed the signs completely, and the memories of another soured night in her Mami’s room didn’t do anything to help ease her anxiety. So she tried to do it herself, taking a few deep breaths before stepping through Alex’s open door, where her son sat at the foot of his bed, considering the stain on his shirt with a quiet pensiveness that made her heart ache.

“Papito? Can I come in?”

“Wow, this must be serious,” her boy answered, with a wry smile that didn’t meet his eyes, and Penelope took a split-second to hate that he’d mastered the art of deflection at such a young age. “You never bother to ask.”

“That’s right, ‘cause I pay the rent, so technically it’s my room,” she joked back, despite the fresh tears stinging at the back of her throat. “I just want to make sure you’re really okay.”

“I mean, I’m worried about Schneider,” he admitted, sounding every bit the man she wasn’t ready for him to be just yet, and she immediately folded herself next to him, wrapping an arm around his shoulders.

“But I’m fine.” Alex indulged the hug for longer than she expected, and Penelope couldn’t help but press her forehead to his neck, bemoaning the fact that he was already too big for her to cradle properly. “It really was nothing, he just shoved me a little when I went to call you.”

“That’s not exactly nothing.” The room went a little crimson again and suddenly she was back on her feet, hands flexing into fists. “We’re gonna talk more once we get him settled, okay?”

“Okay.” He nodded and she moved to make her way back to the mess waiting for her in the living room, but stopped short, bracing a hand on the doorframe when she heard his voice go small and soft. “But, Mami?”

Alex was looking at the ground, fidgeting his feet when she turned back, and Penelope’s lower lip pressed almost painfully against the top to keep a sob from slipping out. “I know you have to do your thing, or whatever, talk to him, but don’t be too hard on him, okay? He’s not Papi.”

She tried not to gasp aloud, but the question came out breathy all the same. “Baby, what do you mean?”

He sighed. “I know you think I was too little, but I remember how Papi used to get.” Her tears started coming then, there wasn’t any sense in trying to swipe at them before they could fall. “But Schneider, it wasn’t like that. He wasn’t angry, I think he was just scared. And sad. He didn’t mean to–”

“But he did,” she interrupted. “That’s an addict thing. And that’s something that he, and I, are gonna have to deal with.”

Alex nodded, but she could tell there was more on his mind. “He really doesn’t want you to hate him,” he explained, and there were about a hundred threads to pull on in that admission, and the soft, uncertain way he let her in on it. “Just don’t–”

His attempted warning, however, was cut off by the sound of the curtain sliding open from the other room, and they both paused, putting the moment on hold for the time being – though Penelope still felt the adrenaline bumping her heart at an unnatural rhythm as she turned to face whatever was coming next.

“You did the right thing by calling us,” she assured her son softly, as Elena and Mami made their way out of the kitchen, supplies in hand –  _“That’s what our family does, right?”_  – and the small smile Alex gave in return eased her nerves just enough to carry on.

* * *

Schneider sobers up quicker than she expects, given what was left in the bottle she tossed in the laundry room trash can, and after his heartfelt thanks – and a stuttered apology to Alex that makes her swallow hard – Penelope clears the rest of the family out of the apartment with almost too much ease. Then, it’s just the two of them.

At first, she’s ready to fight. It’s not a foreign instinct, or even a surprising one. Hypervigilance, Pam sometimes calls it, a product of her PTS – both from the military and life with an abusive alcoholic. Another look into Schneider’s eyes, though, and as the tears well again in her own, she realizes that this is a different kind of battle.

They’ve all spoken different languages, the men in her life. Max is a healer, like her, Mateo a solver. Victor is a warrior, though and through. Even now, with his manicured beard and fancy second wife, she can still see the fire and fight in her ex’s eyes. He’s a soldier, and their life together was a war. Even when they were both back stateside, she never stopped feeling like she was in the trenches.

Schneider, though, he’s a refuge. He’s the door she knocks on when the family is driving her crazy, or she can’t sleep, or it’s three in the morning and she doesn’t have it in her to go another round with the demons that have their own curtain-enclosed living space in her brain. He’s where she looks when she needs strength that feels like it’ll never come, and when she has questions that feel impossible to answer. And now she needs to be those things for him. She has to. Because he’s hurting. Because Alex asked her to. And because…

Penelope’s not entirely sure where that sentence ends. Or maybe she is. Her world’s been upside down since her mother pulled a near-empty bottle of whiskey out of an obnoxiously personalized yoga mat. She doesn’t feel like she’s taken a real breath since the moment she turned to see Schneider finally coming clean, sure that her broken heart was written all over her face, but unable – and maybe unwilling – to hide it.

And tonight, the anger goes out of her almost as quickly, replaced by something darker and gnawing – something she hasn’t had the courage to look too closely at until now.

When she learned of Victor’s relapse, that night in her mother’s bed, she hadn’t wasted any time kicking him out. She needed him gone, as quickly as possible, needed to spare herself and her kids and the fragile idea of a family she was just barely holding together with the strength of her own hands and her Mami’s prayers.

She needed to minimize damage. Call it military instinct. Unbidden, the acronym paints itself in neon on the backs of her eyelids:  _FUBAR_.

But Alex is right, this isn’t the same as it ever was with her ex. She doesn’t want to kick Schneider out, and her gut is telling her that she doesn’t need to. If anything, she’s preparing to hold on tighter. She wants to keep him in her sights, feels, in the deepest part of her, a compulsion to keep him safe.

It only gets stronger when he admits to her the actual moment when he gave in and had his first drink in eight years. Penelope can see so clearly in her memory the way Schneider's face had dropped that day when she told him that he was his father’s son. She remembers how he had looked like a stranger in his suit and slicked-back hair, remembers the way he said her name as she kicked him out of her apartment.

“I had one drink, and I actually managed to stand up to him,” he confesses. Then she remembers something else.

 _“Family’s everything.”_  Those words, the way she could see Schneider’s devotion to her and the people she loves through his thick-rimmed glasses and teary eyes, had been one of the most profound moments in her life so far. It had made her feel something she wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to access again – a stutter step in her heart she’d thought was lost to someone younger and more naive – and the way it’s tainted now, with the realization that he was under the influence, burns like a betrayal.

This night, this conversation, his relapse, these things aren’t about her, but it’s like they were designed to make her confront the feelings she’s been stuffing down only semi-successfully over the last few months, ever since she split from Max. (Maybe even before then, if she’s honest.) She hasn’t been ready to admit to herself that she feels something when Schneider wraps her up in his arms – which happens more often than it probably should if they’re sticking to the whole “just friends” mantra. She feels something when their eyes linger on each other across the room. It’s foreign and familiar at the same time, comforting and terrifying in equal measure. 

She feels safe with him, even when her anxiety has her pinned to the mat – even when it screams that that kind of safety, especially when found in another person, could be the most dangerous of all.

And tonight isn’t the first time Penelope has learned that lesson. She’s done this before, looking into someone’s eyes and pleading with the only person who can save them. But still, it doesn’t feel the same.

Was it harder then, because she knew how she loved Victor? Or is it harder now, because the way she loves Schneider has become increasingly more complicated?

“You’re never gonna trust me again.”

He says it, and her first thought is relief, so strong she almost sighs it out audibly. For once, she doesn’t have to be the one to speak it out loud. For once, she doesn’t have to dole out threats and warnings like grenades, wincing when she looks back to see if they’ve hit their mark. He put his hands on her son, and he knows as well as she does that she’s cut people out of her life for far less.

 _You’re never gonna trust me again._ Her second thought is, that he’s  _wrong_. Somehow, he’s wrong. She trusts him still  – and maybe she shouldn’t. Maybe it will be a mistake. Schneider the Addict is basically a stranger to her, and she knows enough about dependency to understand how situations like these can go from Jekyll to Hyde in the time it takes to blink.

But he’s standing here in front of her, talking about taking her son to his baseball games like it’s the most precious thing she could possibly take away from him, and the truth of the matter is that Penelope can’t imagine a world where she doesn’t trust him.

He’s family, he has been for so long that she didn’t even realize it was happening. They’re his and he’s theirs, and she didn’t need to see his eight-year chip on the wall next to her daughter’s report card to know how he belongs.

“You’re the only one who’s ever trusted me, Pen. All that goes away now.” They’re similar words, but they don’t feel the same the second time. There’s no relief in his resignation, no solace in the way he looks at her like he’s drowning, and she’s the only lifeguard left on the beach.

She realizes that she’s been silent for a long time then, longer than she ever imagined herself being in a conversation like this one. Her throat aches with unshed tears and plenty more are falling to brush salt across her pursed lips. But it’s time to speak now. It’s time to make sure he knows.

“It doesn’t go away,” she tells him, and when her voice goes shaky, it occurs to her how much she truly means it. It’d be like missing a limb, life without Schneider. He fills a missing piece for them, and not a just a crack in the drywall or a spot at the dinner table.

“I’m not giving up on you. None of us are.”

Penelope watches as he turns that over in his brain, watches years of conditioning kick in and try to convince him that it’s a lie. She saw his father walk out on him with ease, just weeks ago, knows that Avery did the same not long after. Someone needs to fight for him this time. Her hands are already clenching to fists.

They’re seated on the couch now, and it’s like the willpower has drained out of him. She knows she needs to move them towards the next step – needs to get him to a meeting – and so she plays her trump card.

“You want to be a good role model for the kids, right?”

She tried never to use Elena and Alex as bargaining chips when it came to Victor’s sobriety. It wasn’t fair, she had repeated to herself, and besides, it never had the intended result. A mention of their family was like pouring gasoline on a fire, it only made him rage about ultimatums and equity and the things that were  _his_.

But this too, is different with Schneider. His eyes close, almost peacefully, on a sigh, and something in her chest sparks anew at the fact that, out of everything,  _this_  is what will push him to try again. Her kids. Their family. “This is your chance.”

In the last hour alone, she’s seen her daughter tell this man that she loves him – anyone who didn’t know Elena well would have thought those words came easy for her – and watched her Mami hand over sopa de pollo like she knows something Penelope doesn’t. Alex forgave him without a thought, and while she knows there will be more to unpack between them, there isn’t a bone in her body that doesn’t believe the two of them will come out the other side even stronger.

But still, all Schneider seems to have are doubts. So she quotes his own words back to himself –  _“Don’t quit before the miracle happens”_  –  and watches him smile for the first time in what feels like far too long.  Penelope’s always fancied herself too practical for miracles, but maybe there’s a time and place for everything.

This is his time. They can be his place.

* * *

_“You don’t have to do that alone.”_

He finally looks back at her then, and she realizes she’s been waiting for it, longing to meet his eyes again and see the spark of the man she knows so well underneath all that hurt and embarrassment.

She’s struck suddenly, with the urge to press her lips to his cheek or his forehead, remembers him waxing poetic once about nontraditional kisses. It would be too much tonight, she tells herself, with everything so close to the surface. So she suppresses the urge without looking too closely at where it came from, and settles instead for drawing his head to rest on her shoulder – a mirror image of the way he’s comforted her so many times before. They exhale a heavy breath at the same time, and for some reason it’s then that’s she’s certain they’re going to be okay.

Later, they’ll return to this same spot – a new chip in his pocket, his first name on the tip of her tongue. He’ll apologize again, and she’ll shake her head and offer to let him sleep on the couch so he doesn’t have to face day two alone. He’ll nod in grateful acceptance and smile in a way that makes her forget her earlier conviction and drop a kiss to his hairline that lingers on her lips as she heads to bed.

Maybe there’s a miracle coming, after all.

* * *

 

_A/N: Come say hey on[Tumblr](http://theshipsfirstmate.tumblr.com/post/183909829404/odaat-fic-feel-im-on-the-verge-of-some-great)!_


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